Frontier Announce Coaster Park Tycoon

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Do you want to good Frontier news first or bad Frontier news? They themselves opened with the good news, so let’s follow suit: Frontier are making a new rollercoaster sim! The RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 devs plan to kick off a new manage ’em up series in 2016 with Coaster Park Tycoon, though they don’t have much to say or anything to show at this point. Then, the bad news. They’ve laid off 15 folks and dragged development roles back from their studio in Canada’s sunny Halifax, which they opened in 2012. But rollercoasters!

All we know about Coaster Park Tycoon for now is that they intend to make it a new series, starting a second big franchise alongside Elite, and that it “is intended to raise that benchmark for ‘Tycoon’ gameplay even further by combining accessible creative features with a sophisticated simulation.” Okay then! Grand.

(Don’t mind that screenshot up there – it’s RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 ’cause I had to have a picture.)

And back to the bad news. An anonymous source Gamasutra that the Halifax studio will close entirely, but that’s just rumours for now.

I’m still hoping we’ll see Frontier’s rollercoaster murder simulator Screamride come from Xbox to PC. It is published by Microsoft and they are pretty insistent that they really for real are interested in PC gaming again for real this time, which is just the sort of false hope I’m reaching for.

I didn’t like RCT3 to begin with, partly cos it ran like pants on my system at the time but having gone back to it since it’s great. I think it really is a worthy successor to the first two and I’m really excited to see what they do with Coaster Park Manager Tycoon World or whatever it’s called.

Poor UI, bad art, bad performance, poor balance, less fun than the originals. I’m not sure about the general consensus (or why that should have any bearing on my opinion) but it currently sits at 81% on metacritic which isn’t exactly universal acclaim.

I kind of hate everything Frontier do though so, I mean, apply salt as needed

One of the biggest complaints about RCT3 is that the park guests are very recalcitrant to actually ride the rides. The reason for this is that they come in groups now, and those groups spend vast amounts of time waiting for one another. There is however a utility called peepfactory that allows you to populate your park with only single guests, which is supposed to mitigate this issue.

Let me guess – online-only version at the release (because you need Frontier servers to track all these little people, where they go and what they do) and gameplay limited to the engine with amazing graphics, building paths and roller-coasters, but nothing else than that?

Wouldn’t surprise me if it was online-only. Seems to be the way certain devs are going. So long as they’re open about it up front I have no problem with that. It was the bait and switch with Elite that was skeevy.

Apparently* Frontier believed they were opening a development office in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and the initial visit didn’t raise any undue suspicions. One member of the survey team did say that it felt like being in another country, but it was pointed out that it’s practically Lancashire.

It was only at their next annual audit, when it was queried why they were spending so much on flights instead of just driving up the A1, that the oversight was spotted, leading to today’s announcement.

Intriguing to note virtually all of it is being dev assisted or dev injected. Whilst some argue this supports the whole “offline would be unacceptably limited” argument, it also suggests that the simulation probably isn’t as complex as was made out.

Therein lies the real rub, Elite is a great “Space trucking” simulator, but for people to actually have measurable change, you have to have all those boring things that don’t seem to be in there, like manufacturing (or the simulation of it), creation (or automated creation of) starbases, capital ships, natural expansion of territory over time, etc.

Right now when people tell me it’s a sandbox MMO, what they’re actually saying is that it’s a desert and you’re being given a bucket and spade, and the wind is blowing at random. Anything you do tends to get washed away by the vagaries of the AI trading black box/aggregated actions of others. The few areas where it has had an appreciable impact (Mikuun, Lugh), they’ve run into bugs, black box oddness, and design limitations (we didn’t code this stuff yet! let us catch up!).

A scoped down version could have easily been put out, but they gotta sell those skins you can’t see!